Day 18

I am having an amazing day! I woke up early, as usual, and since the children start spring break today I spent extra time reading. Each morning I try to read something, along with my scriptures, to help me start the day out positive. This morning I chose Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People“. Our goal this week for my new support group, NMA (pronounced enema for Negative Mental Attitude) was to look for the positive in everyone and every thing. I was happy to read reminders in the first chapter to not criticize, condemn or complain. As I read I had that fruits of the spirit feeling again. My attitude to start the day was right.




We got the children up for scriptures and prayer and read a story from the book of Alma, in the Book of Morman, about the Zoramites. The poorer Zoramites came to the prophet Alma complaining that they had been thrown out of their synagogues because they were poor. They didn’t know what to do and how they could worship. Because they were whining and distraught they were unable to see the options for a solution, so Alma had to explain to them what they could not see because of their negative thinking.

As we were reading I was listening for a way to apply what we were reading to our family and to my personal goal to be more positive. As I listened I had an impression so I wrote it down. I thought about the man in the video in my previous post and how he looked beyond what he could not do to find what he could do.(see the video)

Very shortly after we had the opportunity to apply the principles we learned.

Michaela, the 11 year old, is used to having wheat flakes for breakfast or some other cold cereal, it is what she prefers. After scriptures and prayer she went down stairs to get breakfast. Finding no cold cereal she came into my room and announced that there was nothing to eat. I told her she would have to eat something else. She huffed off to her room and threw herself on the bed. I could hear her whining and mumbling about her plight. I went in and said “ Michaela, just because we don’t have what you want for breakfast does not mean we have nothing to eat.” I reminded her of the scripture story and explained how it could help her know how to handle the situation. “ If you stop thinking about what you can’t do and try thinking about what you can do you will be able to think about something else to have for breakfast“.

We calmly talked about options and she decided that we could make pancakes.

Not much later, Phil had a problem that was stressing him concerning work. We used the same principles and instead of worrying about what we could not do we found something that we could do.